'Journeys like artists are born and not made. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures- and the best of them lead not only outwards in space, but inwards as well.' Discuss this statement in relation to the texts on journeys that you have studied this year. Both journeys and artists possess some inherent qualities from their birth which define, in some ways, the course of their futures.However the impact of environment and 'nurture' are probably more influential than individual characteristics gifted at birth. William Shakespeare, for instance, could not have written great works such as The Tempest if he had been born into a society without a written form of language, or had been a woman born at the same time, as Virginia Woolf demonstrates in her famous A Room of One's Own. His journey and his life would have been remarkably different; and whilst his brilliant faculties would still have resided within him, without a source of outlet he would have died a a death as ignominious as the rest of the vast mass of humanity, rather than being remembered four hundred years later as the greatest English writer of all time. Similarly, in the BOS Stimulus booklet, Shirley Geok-lin Lim makes clear the importance o

The poem is set in the middle ages, and is a product of the 'Romantic', idealising poetry of the 19th Century. This hauntingly rendered 'bad' outcome of the knight's journey is the result of his own naivety, and his need for sexual or romantic love. If the island, for example had not been exactly where it was, it is possible that Prospero and Miranda would have died when Alonso set them adrift. These thoughts do not occur the knight, who is more preoccupied with the emotional desolation that La Belle's enchantment has left upon him, and his bleak and bereft tone echoes Margaret Atwood's poem Journey to the Interior. The development of his character, the narrator, and to a lesser extent the rose are the main focus of the imaginative journey in this story. Obviously the 'faery's child' who is 'full beautiful', with 'long hair' and 'wild eyes' has much to recommend her in this sense, and the ghosts of 'pale kings and princes' are testament to her desirability, but it is also supposed she possesses a magical, unnatural element to her 'faery's song' with which the knight is so enamored that he sees nothing else all day. The journey inwards and outwards exists in the interface between potential and reality. However had Gonzalo not responded to the need of his own nature for compassion in supplying them with Prospero's magic books and food, they would indeed have died before they ever got to the island, or once there, powerless without his books, Prospero would have been at the mercy of the evil Sycorax. She (La Belle) seduces him (the knight), and in so doing casts enchantment over him so that when he wakes he is in 'thrall' or slavery, 'alone and palely' loitering, doomed to do so for the rest of his days. Propsero's understanding of the value of journeys to man's nature can be seen throughout the course of the play. For example, even though he is pleased with Ferdinand as a person and as a potential son-in-law, he creates obstacles to the immediate consummation of Miranda's and Ferdinand's love; calling him a 'Caliban' to the rest of humanity, and setting him tasks as a sort of test of integrity-'lest too light winning Make the prize Miranda light. ' His journey shows him the follies of how we become slave to the small, ugly and essentially insane tasks which we deify in the name of respectability and practicality. In some ways she is very much like the Knight, however, his journey appears really hopeless, trapped forever, whilst Atwood's sense of hopelessness seems more temporal, a product of her own mind, a phase which will pass in her journey through her imagination. For the final destinations of all human journeys lie in the eternal mystery of death, and it is the interface between the fundamental lines along which character is drawn, and the circumstances of the journeys by which we make our choices in which all the value of a journey resides. She will however, one feels, have gained something in the process; a strength, a richness, a new perspective to her life which will not have been there before.